


Christmas with the Dead

by vtn



Category: Canadian Music RPF, Death From Above 1979
Genre: 5 Things, Christmas, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-21
Updated: 2007-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-17 09:46:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/550243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vtn/pseuds/vtn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sebastien wants to do something for Christmas, Jesse keeps pulling candy canes out of nowhere, and there's an elephant in the living room (metaphorically).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Christmas with the Dead

**Author's Note:**

> For [](http://canrockcock.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://canrockcock.livejournal.com/)**canrockcock** prompt #10 "Holidays" and mostly based around the fact that apparently the rumor that DFA used to life in a refurbished funeral home is absolutely true. And, um, in five vignettes because I can't get over my love affair with that style.

_A Very Serious Conversation_  
"Hey, you," Sebastien calls into the living room, swinging around the doorway. Jesse, who seems to have been internal-monologuing at the opposite wall, doesn't miss a beat.

"When I grow up, I wanna be a robot, or maybe fight robots," he says, leaning over the arm of their ratty couch in a crude imitation of what Sebastien imagines his five-year-old self was actually probably a lot like, sticky fingers and all. Wait, about that—

"Where did you get a candy cane?" Stretching out his arm for the candy cane, Sebastien reaches toward the couch. Cheekily, Jesse sticks it in his mouth, making exaggerated blowjob expressions. "You're making me incredibly uncomfortable now."

"'S what I live for." He pops the candy cane back out of his mouth with a noise that is decidedly obscene. "Anyway. Sit down. Make y'self comfortable."

"I do live here, you know," Sebastien says, sitting down on the narrow strip of couch that isn't covered by Jesse leg.

"Right, my casa is your casa and all that," says Jesse. He inches over a little to make room for Sebastien. Or, wait—now he's stretching his legs out even further and resting his feet in Sebastien's lap.

"I live here," Sebastien repeats, more than a little peeved on account of he wanted to actually have a conversation bordering on serious. "Why do you have to be difficult?"

"That sounds like something my mom would say." Jesse goes back to enjoying his candy cane.

"That sounds like something your mom said last night," Sebastien offers, playing along. He even allows himself a small laugh. Jesse says something muffled, then removes the candy cane from his mouth.

"Your mom couldn't even say anything last night, she just moaned and screamed a lot. Well, I guess she might have said, 'Oh God, Jesse, yes, more,' or something." Jesse never even attempts a deadpan, sounding almost like he's in the throes of sexual ecstasy himself (and how weird is it to hear a guy moaning his own name like he's in bed with himself? On a scale of one to ten, at least 'very weird'.)

"I'm still very uncomfortable," says Sebastien.

"Because my shoes are in your lap, or because you get a hard-on when I talk about fucking your mom?"

"Somewhere in between, I guess." He rolls his eyes. "I'm aroused by your shoes in my lap. It's my secret fetish."

"Hn," says Jesse, evidently lacking a clever response. He runs his hand through his bangs, which are hanging in his eyes, and removes his feet from Sebastien's lap. "What did you come here to talk to me about? I remember you were interrupting my career goals."

"Nothing, just that it's Christmas soon," he says, eyeing Jesse's candy cane.

"Should we get a tree and buy each other shit we're never going to use?"

"Oh, fuck off, Ebenezer." Jesse frowns at this slight, which makes him kind of cute, Sebastien thinks, because it means he actually paid attention to _A Christmas Carol_.

"Okay, then why are you telling me it's Christmastime? Am I supposed to remember to put Jesus in my heart?" He knots his eyebrows. "Or…?"

"We need to do something, I think. You know, we're two guys in a punk rock band living in an ex-funeral home, which is pretty damn punk rock, and punk rock is all about doing something with whatever you have. And anyway, well, it's Christmas!" Sebastien has decided it's probably better not to articulate the fact that—

"Is this the first time you've spent Christmas without a girlfriend?"

Uh, well, about that.

"Well, not the first ever."

"Since you lived outside home, anyway."

"Not even that. And anyway I'm not complaining about being lonely." He should hope not! How could he be lonely with Jesse in the house? It's like living with Socrates, Robert Plant, and five preschoolers. "I'm spending Christmas with you, after all. Well, you and all the souls of the dead people that came through here." He pulls a face, then laughs it off. "It's like I said. I just want to do something." Jesse stares at him blankly and then grins.

"Let's buy a tree, then," Jesse says resolutely. Sebastien has to one-up this somehow.

"Let's get hot cocoa," he offers.

"Let's decorate the house!" Jesse hops off the couch and pulls up his socks. "Let's do story time." He steps over to the mantel and looks at it carefully. "We could put mistletoe up here," and damn if that doesn't sound good to Sebastien too. Except…

"Wait, story time?"

"Yeah! Story time."

"All right then."

 _Story Time_  
Despite the fact that Jesse suggested story time, he clearly has no idea what a story time actually consists of. He has draped the windows in blankets and lit candles, and he's sitting on the chair in a headband with a flower stuck in it and a book of poetry in his hand.

"Is this story time or a secret hippie voodoo ritual?" Sebastien asks. He, by the way, is wearing the only blanket he could find (and now he knows why) and has made two mugs of hot cocoa. "Why is it so dark?"

"I was going to do something like what you're doing, but that was boring." He stands up with his poetry book and his little dinky flower, looking like a manic street preacher—not like the band, like an actual street preacher who is actually manic.

"So who's going to go first?" says Sebastien.

"Do you have something ready?" Jesse picks up one of the lit candles and sits down on the couch with it in his lap. "Wow, I almost feel like it's a séance in here," he says offhandedly, and then shakes his head.

"Not really, unless you want me to retell The Three Little Pigs." Sebastien joins Jesse on the couch and, with a wry smile, plops his feet down in Jesse's lap. "So go ahead."

"Um, let's see." Jesse licks his finger and flips through the book. "Gotta find one I know." His finger evidently has gotten dry from all the page-turning because he licks it again, cringing in disgust from the taste of the ink. He scowls, pulls a candy cane out of his pocket (does Jesse have an endless supply of these or something?), unwraps it, sticks it in his mouth, and continues his search. After a few moments of flipping, his face lights up. "Aha! Here we go. Um." He removes the candy cane from his mouth and begins to read. "'Whose woods these are I think I know/His house is in the village though.'"

"Shitty poem," says Sebastien. A little honesty never killed anyone, now did it?

"Fine, have it your way." Jesse continues turning pages as he continues talking. "Most poetry is shit though, anyway. I mean, usually, once a poem gets famous, it stops meaning anything to anyone anymore, and then if it doesn't get famous, it's probably so stupid it doesn't deserve to get famous. But—hmm." He bites his lip. "All right, we've got T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I've totally read this one before, that title sounds way familiar.

"'Let us go, then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon…' Hmm, let's see." He looks bored already, but keeps running his finger down the page. "Oh," he says suddenly, his expression changing.

"'There will be a time to murder and create/And a time for all the works and days of hands/That lift and drop a question on your plate;/Time for you and time for me,/And time yet for a hundred indecisions,/And for a hundred visions and revisions, /Before the taking of a toast and tea."

Watching Jesse's face as he reads is one of the most satisfying things Sebastien can think of. There in his eyes like ticker-tape headlines is his internalizing the words. Sebastien knows he's thinking: So that's what T.S. Eliot was on about. He was talking about people like us.

And then he stops reading.

"So, uh, story time," he says with a tight grin, and he and Sebastien both leave the room after that because there's something big in there they're pretending not to see; the proverbial elephant in the living room that keeps leaving footprints in the butter. Or wait, that's how to tell if an elephant's been in your fridge. Sebastien keeps getting his metaphors mixed up.

 _A Tree  
"O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, a something, something German_ ," Sebastien sings, walking across the dirt path of the Christmas tree farm.

"How about that," says Jesse. "A Christmas tree farm. Is there anything weirder you could farm for?"

"Turkeys," says Sebastien almost without thinking, which scares him a bit. "Turkeys are fucking funny," he qualifies. Jesse bobs his head up and down like a turkey and makes a 'gobble gobble' noise, causing a little girl nearby to burst out into laughter.

So anyway, here is what Sebastien and Jesse discover about buying Christmas trees: they are really expensive.

"I don't get the point of this. It's just mindless consumerism. Especially when you're just going to throw it away after two weeks or whatever," Sebastien says.

"Yeah." Jesse looks dismally down at the $80 price tag on the tree they've chosen, which is small and ugly. Frowning, he sticks his hands in his pockets and ends up coming up with two candy canes. He extends one out to Sebastien. "Candy cane?"

"Yes, please." Sebastien pulls off the plastic wrap and bites off a big piece of the candy cane (sucking and/or licking them, he has decided, is for pussies). Delicious. "You never told me where you're getting these."

"Oh, nowhere, just some store," Jesse says vaguely. He sighs. "Anyway, let's blow this joint."

"Do what?"

"Blow this joint! You know, like." He kicks at a rock. "Leave."

"I knew that, it's just, nobody says 'blow this joint.' Ever."

"How come you've gotta be so judgmental all of a sudden?" Sebastien agrees this is a fair point, so he shuts up and follows Jesse out of the tree farm. Well, almost out. They're in the normal nursery area when something catches his eye.

"There," he says, extending a finger.

"What?"

"There's our Christmas tree. Uh, plant." It is, of course, a bush. A nice enough bush (your mom's got a nice enough bush, his brain immediately responds, which is pretty damn depressing when he thinks about it), despite being about two feet tall and a little bit brown at the edges. "It's beautiful, isn't it? I want to take it home with us and adopt it as our own little orphan child plant."

"This bush?" Jesse, in a pistols-blazing display of manliness, lifts up the bush, pot and all. "This bush is our baby?" He tries his hand at rocking it in his arms, any attempts he may be making at hiding a smile failing miserably. "This bush is totally our baby!"

"You know, I love it when you agree with me."

"I think he has my eyes," says Jesse, ignoring Sebastien completely. "Totally your cheekbones though."

"Okay, maybe you're taking my fantasy too far. I don't think I could ever co-parent with you in real life, anyway." Sebastien gets a sudden flash of guilt—what if Jesse's actually offended by that?—and then laughs it off for the ridiculous notion it is. "We'd just argue over who was going to change diapers."

"No way, man, changing diapers is some cool shit. I would definitely change diapers."

Sebastien clears his throat.

"So we're getting this Christmas bush, right?"

"We are getting this Christmas bush, my friend. And we will keep it in this pot so it will live long after Christmas is gone, and it'll grow alongside us like our, uh, our mutual foundation of shared experience." Jesse nods, looking satisfied with himself, and pats the bush. "He will be a fine addition to our humble home."

"Are we gonna name him?" Sebastien asks as they walk inside to pay for the bush at the counter. He's dimly aware that people are probably going to think they're having an actual child together or something. "How about Englebert?"

"How about Frederick, like after my middle name?" Sebastien tries his best to look hurt, and Jesse adds lamely, "If we get another one we can name him after you." Sebastien does not give up his pathetic look until Jesse amends, "All right, Englebert Frederick."

They pay for the Christmas bush in mostly small bills, then it's back to the house for paper decorations and much coddling from Jesse. He even puts a winter hat on the bush. He is now singing Christmas carols to it. He is starting to scare Sebastien a little bit.

 _Christmas with the Dead_  
On Christmas morning, mourning doves sing (appropriately for the whole funeral home thing, Sebastien figures, and also for the morning thing if you take out the 'u') and Jesse and Sebastien are having hot cocoa and cold oatmeal (don't they call that 'gruel' in some places?) in the kitchen. Well, it isn't really a kitchen, it's a room arbitrarily designated as a kitchen, but it'll do.

Jesse is stirring his cocoa with another. Fucking. Candy cane.

"Can you please just tell me where you got all the candy canes?" Sebastien is getting desperate. He loves a mystery, but there's only so far Jesse can take this.

"Okay," says Jesse, smiling. "Just a second."

"What the fuck does 'just a second' mean in this context?"

Jesse just salutes him and ducks out of his seat to run in the direction of his bedroom. Sebastien gets quickly bored of sitting alone at the table and grabs the candy cane from Jesse's mug so he can stir his own cocoa with it. By the time Jesse gets back, he's chewing on it.

"I got you a Christmas present," says Jesse, putting a large box down on the floor in front of the table. "I was at the music store to get it and they had a bowl of free candy canes and I kept swiping them. So I told them I wanted them for my wife and kids, and the—my present for you was for the kids, right?"

"You told the music store employees you had a wife and kids just so they would give you candy canes?" Jesse nods. "You fucking compulsive liar." Sebastien stands up. "Anyway, I got you a Christmas present too. Let me go get it so we can open them at the same time." He walks off to his bedroom where he has stashed the electric piano he bought for Jesse. He can't wait to see the look on Jesse's face when he realizes he can make even more odd beeping noises than he already does. Besides, he plays piano too, so he can justify to himself the degree to which he's splurged on it by reminding himself that it will be a gift that keeps on giving.

It's a bit of work dragging it into the kitchen, but Sebastien figures it probably just makes him look all the more rugged.

"All right, let's go," says Jesse, rolling up his sleeves. He starts to unwrap his gift and Sebastien starts to unwrap his.

It's an electric piano.

"Jesse, you astound me," he says, staring blankly at a face that stares blankly back.

"Merry Christmas," says Jesse, his tone flat. Then he runs over and flings his arms around Sebastien. "Merry Christmas, dude! It's fucking Christmas and we have new toys!"

"Merry Christmas," says Sebastien, grinning.

"This is like the fucking Gift of the Magi, motherfucker!" says Jesse. Excitement generally does reduce him to profanity.

"Except not exactly, because—" Sebastien takes the plunge into profanity himself. "We can sell half this shit and buy ourselves more toys!"

"Fuck yeah!" Jesse raises his hand and they exchange a high five. Sebastien finishes opening his package, because the piano Jesse bought him is slightly superior to the one he bought Jesse and he figures it'll probably be the one they keep. Jesse joins him, grabbing the manual excitedly and sitting down at the table to read it.

"Wait," he says after a moment. "What happened to my candy cane?"

 _Romance Bloody Romance_  
Late that night it's dark in the funeral home but for the string of lights they've draped around Englebert Frederick the Christmas bush, visible around the corner of the doorframe, and for the glow of Sebastien's laptop as Jesse checks his email.

"Do you ever wonder if anyone really is listening?" Jesse says softly, unprompted.

"Anyone as in…"

"Spirits. Ghosts. You know." Jesse closes his laptop and pads across the rug to Sebastien's bed, where he lies down next to Sebastien. Sebastien doesn't bother to grumble at him for taking up space.

"I guess I don't really believe in that stuff." He scratches his head. "Do you?"

"I don't know." Jesse looks thoughtful. "I'm waiting for the universe to surprise me."

The lights flicker in the other room. All of a sudden, the silence seems filled with voices.

"This kind of quiet has a sound all its own," Sebastien remarks.

"It's the sort of thing we'd usually drown out with amps and keyboards, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"And I guess, in the darkest time of the year, maybe we ought to drive it away somehow," Jesse continues. "I'm just not sure what the best way would be."

"I am," says Sebastien and without further comment he grabs Jesse by the shirt collar. Time to tame that damn elephant. Yet again.

"Good plan," says Jesse. He turns around to face Sebastien. "Let's tear the walls down," he says lazily and runs a hand down the side of Sebastien's face.

Sebastien rolls on top of Jesse, one knee on either side of Jesse's legs, and narrows his eyes. "Merry Christmas, darling," he says sardonically.

"Oh, fuck off," says Jesse, but Sebastien knows he doesn't really mean it.


End file.
